Image SEO Tips for Auto Dealerships

The search engine optimization helps to get a good rank in the search results, everybody knows it. Most people just do it for the content and localized, but not for the images of the auto dealership. Taking some good snaps of the vehicles you have in the dealership and keep it in the website is a best practice and give good online presence to the customers. If you properly optimized them, your images will also display in the search results and the traffic to your site will increase.

Image formats supported by the Google: First you need to pick an image which is in a Google supported format. Google can only index images that are saved in the formats of SVG, WebP, PNG, JPEG, GIF and BMP. If your image is not in that format, no need to worry, most of the image editors are capable to save the image file as JEPG or GIF or any other format which supports by Google. If you are doing by your own, there are plenty of free image format conversion websites available.

Name the image correctly: Most people upload the image with some numbers or img or image or with both combination. They do not give the name what exactly represents the image. In these cases, search engines do not get the image when someone searched for it. Rename the image file with a keyword phrase which describes about the image. Search engines such as Google use these file names to index the images and in sometimes file name can even show as the image title in search engine results page (SERP). Before you giving the name to the image remember that Google consider dashes (-) as word separators and the underscores ( _ ) as combiners of the word.

Alt text: Add helpful alt text for the image. The image’s alt text helps search engines understand the content of the image and they can match the image to the relevant search keywords or query. It also helps those searchers who cannot view the image, to understand what they are looking at. Keep your image alt text as descriptive as possible instead of keyword stuffing. To understand clearly see the following.

Bad – alt=””

Better – alt=”Chevrolet”

Best – alt=”Chevrolet available models”

Avoid – alt=”New popular Chevrolet models”

Instead of the make, you may mention specific model and releasing year, etc. that are easily understandable.

Write image context within content: Your image never live separately from the rest of your on page content. Help the search engines to get a good sense of the story that your page tells by referring the image within the written content. Try to use the matching keywords in the content, image and alt text.

The sitemaps are xml files. These files tell Google about a web page on your website. Submit an image sitemap to the Google Webmaster to get indexed. Update one of your existing sitemaps with image tags or add image specific tags to a sitemap to create an image sitemap.